This year was the first year that I taught using an overarching theme as a link amongst all of the units in both my American Authors classes and my AP English Literature and Composition class. In American Authors, we focused on the theme of "The American Dream" during first semester, which included units on Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, giving a speech using a song to explain your life philosophy, and writing a research paper on a career. Second semester, we have been discussing the overarching theme of "The American Reality." We read Miller's The Crucible, Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and we are currently finishing Wright's Native Son. We also did a unit on Poetry, and the students wrote their College Application Essays.
In AP English, the theme was PLACE. I decided on this theme after having assigned Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles as summer reading and also requiring that all students subscribe to National Geographic magazine. I was trying to decide how I was going to connect these two very different types of reading assignments when I stumbled across the 1991 Question Three AP Prompt which asks students to compare the significance of two different places in a novel or play. Aha! Place was it.
With every unit, students discussed the idea of Place. Does your physical place in the world matter? Place in time? Place in your family? Place in your society? What if you feel that you have no place? For each novel and play, we returned to questions relating to Place. We kept a bulletin board in the back of the room where students posted images that they felt related to the theme of Place. In some fantastic cosmic coincidence, the final essay question on the AP exam this year related to the theme of Place.
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